Depression and low mood

32 teachings in the library are about this.

Session Three - The Laziness of Discouragement David Oromith · 99 minutes · recorded June 2, 2026
The third laziness, discouragement, the "this is not for me" that stops practice before it starts. David quotes Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo on feeling unworthy and Ven. Thubten Chodron's Martha's mantra, then sets Buddha nature against it: pile on the mud and the diamond is still a diamond. Pema Chodron's antidote is lightening up. David then has you hear your own words in a friend's voice, then turn your answer back on yourself, closing on phrases of loving kindness.
Practising with Joy: Lightness and Humour on the Buddhist Path David Oromith · 83 minutes · recorded April 19, 2026
The evening opens with gratitude for a precious human life and closes with a longer empathetic joy practice in which we rejoice in good fortune, a loved one's happiness and even people you find difficult. David draws on the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu to show how humility frees us from self-preoccupation, and how joyful effort, reframing, humour and gratitude counter the mind's negativity bias. He shares his own depression and homelessness as reframed hardship.
That was the River, This is the Sea David Oromith · 28 minutes · recorded February 15, 2026
In the gratitude meditation we move through the body, the home, our relationships and the natural world. David reflects on a Waterboys lyric, that was the river, this is the sea, and uses the image of a water slide to talk about letting go of an old version of yourself and accepting the life a difficult period has carried you into.
Hope In Difficult Times David Oromith · 36 minutes · recorded September 14, 2025
In the candle visualisation meditation we draw in the pain of the world as fuel that makes an inner light burn brighter, then breathe out compassion to push back the darkness. David talks about despair as the near enemy of compassion, how fixating on bad news skews our sense of reality, and how seeking out examples of goodness and empathetic joy restores a truer, more hopeful picture of the world.
D4S3 - Compassion, and Choosing Someone You Can Work With David Oromith · 92 minutes · recorded August 21, 2025
Compassion and loving kindness are two sides of the same coin, as Lama Alan Wallace puts it, but the flavour of the practice is different: here you attend to beings who are suffering, with the active mind that asks what can I do to help. David is practical about the hostile person, having had people go straight for Hitler or Putin and then say they could not wish him well, and suggests an annoying colleague. Afterwards, why brief practices more often beat one long block.
D4S3 - Settling the Mind, and the Emotions That Surface Lama Alan · 88 minutes · recorded June 12, 2025
A guided practice of settling the mind in its natural state, upright or lying down, with instructions to refresh, restore and retain attention whenever it wanders. Lama Alan warns against forcing concentration onto a fixed object, since this tightens and agitates many minds, recommending instead watching thoughts from a distance, as a herdsman watches his flock. He describes what surfaces once the mind loosens: old memories, sudden depression, bliss.
D5S1 - Shamatha Without a Sign, and Stages Six and Seven Lama Alan · 115 minutes · recorded June 5, 2025
The session opens with a guided practice of awareness of awareness in which we rest without any object at all, followed by why this is considered the ultimate retreat. Lama Alan then maps stages six and seven of the nine stages of shamatha, where old material gets dredged up and desire, depression and lethargy can surface, and explains how to tell a meditative experience from something needing a doctor. He warns against treating each stage as a goal to chase.
D1S2 - The Coal Burning Plant, and Genuine Unhappiness Lama Alan · 97 minutes · recorded June 5, 2025
The image is a coal burning plant that must be switched off before solar panels can work: hedonic pursuits crowd out the genuine well-being meditation cultivates. Lama Alan applies the same logic to suffering, contrasting solitary confinement with a yogi's cave, same conditions but opposite minds. Questions range from fatigue and rest between sessions to a devotee told repeatedly it is even better to practise Dharma, ending with the value of retreat.
Being of Benefit: Aspiring Bodhisattvas in a Complex World (Part Two) David Oromith · 82 minutes · recorded May 7, 2025
This second session opens with a gentle practice in which we breathe space and compassion around whatever despair, anger or fear arises when facing the world's crises. David then maps the Eightfold Path onto engaged action, from authentic view and speech through to effort, and reads several of Thich Nhat Hanh's precepts on non-attachment to views, speech and livelihood. Questions cover the ethics of the arms trade during the war in Ukraine and how to pass on values to children without imposing them.
Compassion vs Despair: A Buddhist Approach to Witnessing Suffering (David Oromith) David Oromith · 90 minutes · recorded April 1, 2025
Compassion and its near enemy, despair: how to attend to the suffering of others and of the world without being overwhelmed by it.
Caring for Yourself While Caring for Others (David Oromith) David Oromith · 59 minutes · recorded January 26, 2025
This Insight Timer talk for carers opens with a short body based meditation on motivation. David sets out three levels of burnout, emotional exhaustion, loss of meaning, and depersonalization, with the antidote to each, then turns to universal compassion, naming despair as compassion's near enemy and describing the friend based thought experiment for self compassion. Carers share their own motivations and advice throughout, and this first part ends with a loving kindness meditation.
Session 2 - Practices for Inner Joy David Oromith · 71 minutes · recorded January 19, 2025
The session opens with a short meditation on gratitude in which we notice where appreciation is felt in the body. David then describes three doorways to joy: living kindly, the calm that meditation brings, and a settled confidence he calls the joy of knowing, alongside practices of empathetic joy, rejoicing and harvesting delight from ordinary moments. Questions cover keeping compassion for others in balance with self-care, and what to do on waking in a low mood. It closes with a guided harvesting joy practice.
Session 1 - Mindfulness of the Body David Oromith · 91 minutes · recorded October 31, 2024
This first session on mindfulness of the body opens with an extended teaching, tracing how the Buddha added inquiry to shamatha to found vipassana, and a cup shows how perception differs from concepts we add on top. In the body scan that follows, we take attention to sensations of solidity, moisture, temperature and motion, asking whether each is permanent, pleasant and truly ours. Afterwards the group discusses separating pain from sensation, and how calling something mine builds a false sense of ownership.
Session 3 - Compassion David Oromith · 85 minutes · recorded September 24, 2024
In compassion practice we move from ourselves through a suffering acquaintance, a loved one, a stranger and finally someone acting cruelly, wishing each free of suffering and its causes. David distinguishes compassion from its near enemies, grief and pity, describing how despair once fed his own depression working in mental health wards, and why compassion stays active rather than overwhelmed. Members discuss compassion fatigue, burnout and caring for an ageing parent.
Session 3 - Empathetic Joy & Equanimity David Oromith · 58 minutes · recorded June 11, 2024
In the guided practice in empathetic joy we rejoice in our own good qualities, a loved one's happiness, and the kindness of strangers. David describes mudita as harder to sustain than it looks, distinguishes it from envy and cynicism, and tells how seeking joy in a local park helped him through depression. He then teaches equanimity, showing how we sort people into loved, neutral and disliked, and how true equanimity extends equal warmth to all three, unlike the flat indifference that mimics it.
Session 2 - Compassion David Oromith · 57 minutes · recorded June 10, 2024
In the guided compassion meditation we move from ourselves through a loved one, a neutral person and someone in conflict, wishing each freedom from suffering. David distinguishes compassion from despair, its near enemy, describing his own depression while working in mental health services. He draws on the Dalai Lama and a visit to a man living amid hoarded possessions to show empathy turning into active care rather than paralysis. A question on karma is held over for later.
Good? Bad? Who Knows? David Oromith · 28 minutes · recorded April 21, 2024
In the subtle mindfulness of breathing practice we track the sensation of air at the nostrils and sharpen attention with each in breath while relaxing further with each out breath. David shares the story of the king, his amputated finger and the doctor's shrugging reply, using it to question how quickly we label events as good or bad before we know how they will unfold. He reflects on setbacks from his own life, including his depression, that later turned out to serve him.
A Candle in Darkness - Compassion in the World David Oromith · 35 minutes · recorded October 8, 2023
In the compassion meditation we use the image of ourselves as a candle: we breathe in strength for the flame using empathy for the world's suffering, then breathe out the wish that all beings find freedom from it, until other candles begin to light around us. Responding to a question about feeling overwhelmed by the news, David distinguishes empathy from despair, which he calls compassion's near enemy, and shares the Dalai Lama's insistence on never giving up.
Week 2: Compassion (Karuna): Cultivating a genuine concern for the sufferings of others and compassionate action David Oromith · 86 minutes · recorded June 15, 2023
The session opens with a short breathing meditation to settle the group, before David turns to compassion, karuna, the wish for others to be free of suffering. He names its near enemy, despair, drawing on his own past depression while working on mental health wards, and its far enemy, cruelty, and why compassion must lead to action rather than pity or anger. Questions cover rudeness at work and a wedding venue caught in protests. The session closes with a meditation in which we extend the wish through self, loved one, neutral and difficult person.
Connecting to Communities for Genuine Wellbeing Ondy Willson · 116 minutes · recorded May 4, 2023
Ondy Willson asks whether our trouble with anxiety and depression is partly a symptom of isolation, and answers by working outwards from the self to the communities around it. She sets out what Freud, Jung and Thich Nhat Hanh made of the self, then how conditioning hardens into habit and tendency, and which constructive emotions serve as antidotes. The rest is the effort connection takes, and what headphones, video calls and social media quietly cost us. Three guided practices run through.
Reflecting On Our Impermanence David Oromith · 27 minutes · recorded April 16, 2023
The session opens with a short breathing meditation to settle the body, before we turn attention to how even the most solid seeming sensations are constantly changing. Prompted by the recent deaths of two teachers in his lineage, David talks about why Buddhist practice deliberately contemplates impermanence and our own death, not to bring on despair but to clarify what actually matters: valuing the relationships and time we have rather than getting lost in old arguments or in worry about the future.
S3 - The Four Immeasurables, and Empathetic Joy Against Loneliness David Oromith · 86 minutes · recorded January 26, 2023
The session opens with a brief meditation on the breath, before David turns to the four immeasurables: loving kindness, compassion, empathetic joy and equanimity, practices for countering loneliness and low mood. He works through each, warning that reciting the words is not yet the mind itself, then leads a guided metta meditation in which we extend kindness through a loved one, a neutral person and someone difficult. Questions turn to forgiveness, cognitive fusion and using longer exhales to calm the body.
How to Attend to Suffering Without Feeling Burdened David Oromith · 13 minutes · recorded November 7, 2022
In this episode, David explores how to attend to the sufferings of the world without falling into despair and feeling burdened. Using his own experience of compassion and despair, and inspired by the teachings of the Dalai Lama, he explores why we should cultivate compassion for the sufferings of the world in the first place, and how to avoid this crippling feeling of despair.
Four Aspects of Mental Balance Lama Alan · 87 minutes · recorded August 29, 2022
Lama Alan Wallace argues that modern psychology mistakes symptoms such as depression and anxiety for disorders, and looks outward for causes that are primarily inward. Drawing on the Nalanda tradition, he sets out four kinds of mental balance, conative, attentional, cognitive and emotional, each able to fail through deficit, hyperactivity or dysfunction. It is exposition throughout, with no guided practice. Questions cover his fourfold vision quest and compassion in wartime.
D2S2 - Compassion, Not Despair, and the Small Adversities Lama Alan · 83 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022
Lama Alan Wallace returns to a point he had passed over, on training in compassion, and gives Buddhaghosa's analysis of it and its false facsimile, despair, which looks like it and is not. Practise first with minor adversity, the text says, and it will gradually become easier. Whether a thing is agreeable or disagreeable is the way our minds apprehend it, as with a dentist's drill. Half an hour of questions follows, on shamatha and dzogchen and on why expressing a toxic emotion deepens the habituation.
D1S2 - Dispensing with Aversion to Adversity Lama Alan · 76 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022
Adversity can only become the path if two things happen, and Lama Alan Wallace takes both: dropping the attitude of utter aversion to it, then finding a sense of well-being that holds even when things go badly. He distinguishes suffering itself, which is a symptom, from the mental afflictions that cause it, and repeats Shantideva's point that despondency helps neither what can be remedied nor what cannot. Day one ends with a guided practice of settling the mind in its natural state.
D3S2 - Near Enemies, and Tonglen Mounted on the Breath Lama Alan · 85 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022
Teaching and questions, no guided practice. Lama Alan Wallace works through the near enemies of the four immeasurables, taken from Buddhaghosa's Path of Purification, self-centred attachment posing as loving kindness, despair as compassion, then the progression in tonglen, starting with your own mother and later mounted on the breath, and the aphorism begin the sequence of taking with yourself. A young father asks whether to put family responsibilities aside for a long retreat.
D2S1 - Renunciation, Refuge, and a Remedy for Each Adversity Lama Alan · 92 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022
A general notion is not enough, so Lama Alan Wallace works through the specific practices the text names for particular adversities: renunciation as a spirit of definite emergence, going for refuge, dispelling the arrogance that leaves a person as sterile as soil on a mountain top, purifying non-virtue by pondering the four laws of karma, rejoicing in virtue, and cherishing others more than oneself. In the guided practice we draw the darkness of the world into an orb of light at the heart, the receiving end of tonglen.
D1S1 - Whatever Attitude You Cultivate Grows Stronger Lama Alan · 94 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022
Lama Alan Wallace opens with gratitude to his teachers, then, following Gyatrul Rinpoche's commentary, says who the text is for: those who put genuine well-being above mundane pleasure. The homage follows, then the text's first lines, on how a mind habituated to dwelling on suffering turns the most insignificant circumstance into great distress, and that depression comes from the mind and not the brain. The session closes with a guided twenty minute practice of settling body, speech and mind in the natural state.
D4S1 - Blame Everything on One Culprit Lama Alan · 92 minutes · recorded January 1, 2022
Lama Alan Wallace explains the two week gap, a perforated intestine and six days in hospital, then takes up the third point, transforming adversity into the path. In Buddhaghosa's framework he names despair, apathy and delight in one's own good fortune as near enemies of compassion, impartiality and empathetic joy, and works through the aphorism blame everything on one culprit, with Shantideva on self-grasping as the great demon. In the guided practice we cultivate the four immeasurables as the four greats.
D1S3 - William James on Attention, and the Shamatha Project Lama Alan · 67 minutes
William James held that each of us chooses, by our ways of attending, what sort of universe we appear to inhabit. Lama Alan turns that on narcissism and on low self-esteem, and on why a materialist and a contemplative find different things obviously real. James also thought sustained attention a fixed trait; the three month Shamatha Project, with seventy subjects, showed otherwise. Relaxation supports stability, stability supports vividness, and skipping a step ends in burnout.
Loving Kindness Glen Svensson · 78 minutes
Loving kindness, maitri, is defined by Glen Svensson as an aspiration rather than an emotion: the wish for ourselves and others to have happiness and its causes. Two guided practices: in the first we cultivate it for ourselves through reflections on our own deepest aspirations, and in the second we extend it in stages to a friend, a stranger and a difficult person. Glen distinguishes pleasure from genuine happiness and names its causes as ethics, concentration and wisdom.

Depression and low mood

Depression and low mood

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